Copyright holders, such as for music or video content, are generally entitled to compensation for each instance that their song or video is played. For music copyright holders in particular, determining when their songs are played on any of thousands of radio stations, both over the air, and now on the internet, is a daunting task. Traditionally, copyright holders have turned over collection of royalties in these circumstances to third party companies who charge entities who play music for commercial purposes a subscription fee to compensate their catalogue of copyright holders. These fees are then distributed to the copyright holders based on statistical models designed to compensate those copyright holders according which songs are receiving the most play. These statistical methods have only been very rough estimates of actual playing instances based on small sample sizes.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,990,453 issued Jan. 4, 2006 describes a system and method for comparing unknown media samples from a media stream such as a radio stations signal against a database of known media files such as songs, in order to track the instances of play for known songs. Unfortunately, much of the content of a media stream is not previously known for a variety of reasons. For example unique audio such as talk shows, the conversations or introductions of disk jockeys, or DJs, and other similar audio, represent unique audio that will not be recognizable.
There may be other unrecognized audio however, that may be of interest to a system for monitoring audio streams, and may in fact be associated with a copyright holder who should be compensated. Such non-recognized audio of interest could be a previously unindexed song, or a commercial which may use copyrighted music, or other recognized and repeated audio segments. These non-recognized audio segments may be repeated inside a single media stream or may be repeated across multiple media streams, such as a regional commercial playing on multiple radio stations.
What is needed is a system and method for recognizing repeated segments or samples in one or more otherwise non-recognized media streams, where the system and method are capable of matching samples against previously fingerprinted or index samples to find occurrences of repeated unrecognized media.